Page 3 of Catcher's Lock

“Why not?”

“I keep leaving them out to get rained on.” He takes in my horrified expression with a shrug. “Yeah, that’s pretty much how my mom looked the last time she found one. Only with a lot more yelling.” He glances down at his tilted handlebars. “But I can maybe be trusted with a socket wrench. If you show me which one to use.”

“What if I fix your bike, and you finish pulling the screws out of the roof. With the driver.” I snatch it up and hold it out, revving the motor briefly in a frantic attempt to see him smile again.

“Really? I’ll probably fuck it up. Strip the gaskets or whatever.” But a grin tugs at the corners of his wide mouth, and I decide I’ll buy the replacement screws myself if I need to.

“Nah. It’s not that hard.”

“I’m Gem,” he says, offering his hand. The tips of my ears burn when I clasp it. His fingers are strong and a little rough, and a shock runs up my arm at the contact.

“I’m Josha.”

“So how’d you wreck your bike, anyway?” I ask, trying to clean one of the bolts enough to fit the hex wrench into the head. Luckily, the handlebars aren’t bent, only jammed out of position, but the bolts are all gunked up with the sandy pygmy soil, so it’s taking me forever to loosen them.

“I’m grounded.”

I blink at him, confused.

“You ran away?”

“Nah. I’m allowed to ride my bike around. Grounded means something different in my family.” His dark eyes sparkle with conspiracy, begging me to ask.

“What does it mean, then?”

“No aerials. I’m in the circus.” He waits for me to be suitably impressed.

I have no idea what “aerials” are, but I don’t disappoint him. “The circus? Like, with elephants and clowns and stuff?”

“No elephants. My parents don’t believe in them. Only people. Acrobats and jugglers and contortionists,” he adds with obvious pride.

“Your parents don’t believe in elephants?” I’ve only seen them in YouTube videos, but I know they’re real. Not like unicorns or dragons. He laughs, and I blush, but only partly from embarrassment.

“They don’t believe in abusing animals for human entertainment,” he clarifies. It has the feel of a practiced statement, something he’s heard and explained a hundred times, and my cheeks heat further.

“We only keep chickens for the eggs,” I hasten to explain. “They’re not…abused, or anything.”

“I heard chickens are really stupid, anyway,” he says, watching Rosie the Rhode Island Red peck through the sawdust at my feet. “And we eat them, so…that’s kind of abusive.” He laughs again at my horror, the sound bright and a little scratchy in a way that makes me curl my toes in my sneakers.

“That was the last screw.” He bangs his fist on the loose metal and yelps when the whole thing slides off with a loud rattle. Before it can crush his toes, he leaps back with feline grace and shoots me a shocked grin. “Whoops. What next?”

“Next, we flip it and screw it back on. That’s the fun part.” I show him the sharp grooves along the length of the screws and the little black gaskets that make the watertight seal, and we spend the next hour kneeling together on the roof, passing the screw gun back and forth.

He talks alot. Which is nice because it means I don’t have to. And because his voice is low and scratchy and warmer than the tentative May sunshine.

He tells me his family finally bought their own circus tent and moved onto the undeveloped property behind ours. That he grew up in Europe, traveling around to countries I’ve only imagined and some, like Croatia, I’ve never even heard of. Apparently, he’s started training on something called a Chinese pole. He swears it’s not a stripper pole, even though it sounds similar, and I have to pretend to be concentrating really hard on the sheet metal screws to keep from thinking about the YouTube videos I’ve seen on my friends’ phones. The girls in those videos never really interested me, but imagining Gem in one of those strappy underwear things, dancing around with a sultry smile, is enough to make my brain explode.

To change the subject before I pop a boner, I tell him the next thing I want to do is wire a light-sensitive switch that will close the coop automatically when it gets dark. Mainly so my dad will stop yelling at Jeremy for leaving it open every time a skunk or a bobcat steals one of the chickens.

“You know how to do electrical work?”

“A little bit. There’s an after-school club I did in sixth grade before…before my dad got bad again and I had to start coming home to watch Jeremy until my mom gets home from the clinic.”

“Is he sick or something? Your dad?”

“He’s an alcoholic.”

Gem sits back on his heels and glances at me, the screw gun limp in his hand. “That sucks.”